by Maria McCann
‘She’s a wicked, disloyal, dishonest woman,’ Sophia complains. The words seem inadequate even to her; she wonders what they call Mrs Launey downstairs, where language is freer. ‘Didn’t you notice she was lining her pocket?’
‘Maids can’t question the cook’s doings.’ Fan’s mouth has taken an obstinate little turn. Of course, Sophia thinks, servants detest tale-bearing. Had Launey not deserted, then Fan, decent as she is, would scarcely have said so much. ‘But it’s my opinion, Madam – if you won’t think it impertinent in me ―’
Sophia braces herself. ‘Yes?’
Fan lowers her eyes. ‘The thing is – if you will permit – it’s my belief that Mrs Launey couldn’t have known the master would be away.’ She clears her throat: a tiny, discreet sound.
‘That must be obvious, surely,’ Sophia replies. ‘When Mrs Launey left, Edmund was still here. I don’t understand the application of your remark ―’ and then she does understand, and stops dead. Fan means there will be gossip: it will be whispered that a tender understanding existed between Edmund and a woman with the shape, complexion and perspiring wetness of a boiled beetroot. Her husband and Peg Launey! And Fan, if you please, talks not of knowledge to the contrary but of belief! Evidently some shred of wifely pride remains in Sophia despite the humiliations piled upon her by Edmund, for Fan’s hint, though kindly meant, stings like vinegar.
Sophia’s head bows in misery as she blames herself: I should have gone into everything, no matter what he said. It was my business to go into it.
But Edmund had insisted that things were already upon a well-established footing, an arrangement set up during those years when there was no such person as Mrs Zedland. Looking back, she realises that each time she attempted to investigate the servants’ doings, he at once moved to thwart her: you have not the experience, they know their duties very well without you. ‘But they must at least answer to me,’ she protested, to which he replied, ‘And so they do! What more could you wish?’
‘The house has never suited me,’ she says aloud. ‘I should prefer another.’
‘I’m sure he’ll release you, Madam, if you don’t dispute the remainder.’
Sophia can make nothing of this information, delivered in a manner so respectful as to rule out any sly reference to Edmund. Before she can request clarification, Fan cries out, ‘Beg pardon, Madam. I forgot my instructions.’
‘Instructions?’
‘Mr Zedland’s. Your sentiments, you know, on the subject of,’ Fan’s voice lowers as if to utter some unavoidable indecency, ‘renting.’
‘What can you mean?’ Sophia exclaims. ‘What sentiments?’
‘The master said,’ the maid falters, ‘we were never to speak of it. That you considered it – vulgar.’
‘But some of the best families rent for the Season.’
Fan casts down her eyes like a saint in a painting. Hers is a very speaking sort of silence: to misinterpret it, one would have to be blind as well as deaf.
‘Let us understand one another,’ Sophia says at last. ‘You, and the other servants, were told by Mr Zedland that on no account was the tenancy to be mentioned in my presence, and that he wished the house always to be spoken of as belonging to him.’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘But it does not.’
This time the answer is longer in coming. ‘No–o,’ Fan says, as if only now realising the significance of her own words. Raising her head, she gazes, helpless, at Sophia. ‘It belongs to Mr Moore.’
Sophia gazes back, watching Fan’s pretty mouth compress to a bloodless incision. She forces herself to take deep and regular breaths, imposing a control she does not feel. This must be how soldiers face fire and shot, she thinks: one keeps putting one leg in front of the other, though suffering unspeakably from anticipation, until the last unlucky step. Then one fathoms the depths in an instant.
‘So we’re the tenants of this – Mr Moore. And who may he be?’
‘He owns all these houses, Madam. He built the street.’
‘A builder and speculator, then.’
‘Madam, we believed you knew, we did indeed ―’
The girl shakes and weeps. Sophia pictures the scene: the candour and good humour with which the master of the house explained his wife’s little whims. O, the tenderness of his regard for her! The pain he suffered if her wishes were crossed in the slightest! His earnest desire that the servants should do everything necessary to her happiness, and of course the eyes, the eyes speaking more than all of this together. What woman could fail to envy his wife?
She wonders that he did not, after all, ruin Fan. Had he given himself over to the work of seduction he must surely have met with success but perhaps, thinks Sophia, it suited him not to foul his nest at home. He had, in any case, interests elsewhere.
‘You are not to blame,’ she says now, pitying the girl’s mottled cheeks – for Fan is like herself, an ugly weeper. ‘When you said someone would release me, I take it you meant Mr Moore. Are you acquainted with him?’
‘He put us in here. First me, then Eliza and Mrs Launey.’
‘Am I to understand that you came with the house, like the chairs?’
‘Mr Moore’s business is with people coming to town at short notice. He prefers to have his own servants in place, says things are better looked to. Though Launey’s wiped his eye this time.’
‘Have your wages been paid?’
‘His man brings them last day of the month.’ Fan dabs at her eyes. ‘It’s not often you find a master so open-handed.’
‘Indeed.’ Mama’s servants are paid after half a year, which at least discourages them from vanishing into the night. ‘So, if I should leave this house, you’ll be turned off?’
‘No, Madam. If nobody takes this place, he’ll put me into another. I’ve worked for him three years now and he finds me satisfactory.’
Does he approve likewise of Eliza and Mrs Launey? At the thought of the latter a faint and not disagreeable sensation, of which she has been aware for some time, becomes more insistent and announces itself as hunger.
‘Did you find anything for supper?’
‘There’s cold beef.’
‘Bring it up here, with some wine.’
‘It’ll do you good, Madam, I’m sure I hope so,’ and Fan is off to retail the latest horrors to Eliza. Every word of their conversation will be repeated downstairs, as Sophia well knows. Still, there remains gratitude for Fan’s kindness. Miss Sophia Buller that was, grateful for the kindness of a servant! Had Edmund been a little kinder, what might she not have grown to tolerate, in the end? Degraded, yet doting: an ignoble fate, not uncommon among women. Would it, all things considered, have involved more suffering than her own?
Not Fan, but Eliza (unable, Sophia supposes, to resist this chance of witnessing her humiliation) arrives bearing cold beef, some slimy green stuff in a dish, bread and fruitcake and a jug of wine. The beef resembles leather. There is something to be said for even the most unscrupulous cook, provided she is handy at her work. Mrs Launey would have taken one look at the coarse, dry chunks and cut them fine to be heated through in a good gravy.
Having dismissed the girl, Sophia contemplates the unappetising mess before her and imagines Hetty’s verdict, particularly on the ‘garden thrash’. What will she do for a cook? Since all such hiring is the responsibility of Mr Moore, she assumes she has not the right to advertise.
How much better to choose one’s own staff, in one’s own home, with one’s loving husband, children, relatives and friends: all the accoutrements of feminine happiness which this female has so signally failed to acquire.
She sniffs at the jug. Surely even Eliza knows that a gentlewoman does not sit and drink alone. ‘Mrs Buller,’ guests would solicit her mother, ‘will you take wine with me?’ – a charming courtesy which gave pleasure to all concerned. That is how life is meant to be: improved, polished, refined. To take it in the rough is to take a raw onion and bite into its stinking, stinging
core: a primitive sensation, disgusting to the refined palate. For civilised people there is the long apprenticeship of education, morality, taste: the daily endeavour to haul up from the mud our fallen human nature.
With a blush, she remembers: she herself asked for wine. She meant as a restorative, but Eliza has brought her sufficient for inebriation. Perhaps it is intended, in the crude well-meaning way of such people, as a kindness. Sophia takes a sip. Surely this was broached days ago. Yet she sips again, in a silent toast to the life upon which she is about to embark, a life in which wine of any description may prove a rarity. She grinds, a dutiful child, at the leathery beef. The vegetables (leeks, apparently) have congealed in their butter dressing, but she eats them all. At least the fruitcake is palatable. She pours herself another glass of stale wine, pushes the tray away from her and sits back to think.
Now what? Now what. She must make a list of everything requiring attention, must write to Mr Moore, to Hetty. To Mama and Papa? What will they say, she wonders, upon discovering that her husband has bolted? Will they admit that Sophia was right all along, and Edmund a practised deceiver and yes, a forger? Though he has destroyed the contents of the desk, the maids and Hetty can attest to the arrival of Edmund’s ‘friend’, no longer a suspicion but a living, breathing animal in satin shoes. After Mama’s unfeeling reassurances, there is a grim satisfaction in contemplating that aspect of her domestic catastrophe.
Should Edmund not return, and she hardly expects him to, she and her parents must take measures to seek him out. They will come to some arrangement, she supposes: beat Edmund away from his prey, pay him to sign a deed of separation. Will he pocket his ‘winnings’ with those elegant fingers of his, smiling a vulpine smile, or will he claw and bite? Until this moment, Sophia realises, she has been picturing him as fled to Wixham. Does that place even exist, or is it like this one, a convenient fable?
There is a knock at the door.
‘Yes?’
Fan enters in more of a flutter than Sophia has ever seen her before. ‘Madam, that woman’s here.’
Sophia is past pretending not to understand. ‘The one with the earrings? Get rid of her.’
‘We were about to, Madam, but she claims to know something to your advantage. Very much so, she said.’
If only Hetty were present. What would she advise? ‘She can’t come in here. I won’t have her in here.’
‘Of course not, Madam. She won’t be let out of our sight. Should you wish to see her, I’ll tell Eliza to go with her into the Blue Room until you arrive. Be so kind as to hold still, one second ―’ Fan reaches out and pins back a lock of her mistress’s hair.
‘Is Eliza with her now?’
‘Yes, Madam. She’s strong is Eliza, well able to hold the door.’
‘Good,’ says Sophia. ‘I should hate to lose the plate as well as Mrs Launey.’
And the master, she can feel the maid thinking. Certainly this is an unfortunate house.
44
In the Blue Room the person stands quite at ease, apparently accustomed to scrutiny. Accepting the implied permission, Sophia studies her in a manner unthinkable with a polite visitor. She sees a tall female with some faint, bedraggled relics of elegance, not unlike an out-of-work lady’s maid. She notes the woman’s height, her large, capable hands and the toes (shod today in red leather) protruding from beneath her gown. Yes, this person could have filled the satin shoes. Her complexion is brown, her lips (as Sophia has previously noted) full and coarse. By candlelight the eyes and brows are inky, not unlike Edmund’s. Why, they could be sister and brother! Are all these people related? Will that dirty brute who came to the door turn out to be one of her in-laws?
One thing is certain: Sophia herself is Odd Man Out. She says, ‘I believe you have something to tell me.’
The woman’s voice is a fortune-teller’s wheedle. ‘Everything, Madam. Everything you wish to know.’
‘I wonder.’ This creature could not begin to comprehend all that the wife of Edmund Zedland wishes to know, still less what she would shrink from knowing. ‘You would presumably require some payment?’
‘No, by God! And I shan’t accept any.’
For the first time Sophia glimpses her appeal: a self-possession that owes nothing to the dancing-master’s deportment. With a certain dryness she replies, ‘Pray excuse my ignorance. If there is an etiquette for such meetings as this, I confess it does not spring to mind.’
The visitor’s mouth turns up just a hair’s breadth as if she, too, perceives the absurdity of their situation. ‘We could have introductions,’ she suggests. ‘And tea.’
‘Introductions and tea! This is indeed the Age of Gentility,’ says Sophia. ‘Let me ask you one thing before we “have introductions”, as you put it. Have you come from Mr Zedland?’
On hearing his name, the woman turns and spits into the fire.
She’s been thrown over, Sophia thinks. She seeks revenge, and I – good God! – I am to be the means.
It was folly to allow her over the doorstep. Sophia rings the bell without further ado, intending to have her visitor shown out. But as Eliza bustles in, eager for raised voices and pulled hair, Sophia seems to hear Hetty’s words: little goose. Blind and deaf. All very well for Hetty, who objected to sitting in a public room with this same person. Still, what does it matter, now, if the woman stays? Chaos is already come. She tells Eliza to fetch some tea.
The woman says, ‘I take mine with French Cream.’
Sophia, to whom the expression is unfamiliar, is rescued by Eliza’s ‘Brandy, Madam.’
‘There’s nothing of that sort to be had. I’m afraid our cook has absconded with the cellar key.’
The visitor throws her an insolent look but Sophia is adamant: if she wishes to get drunk, she must do it elsewhere. Fan is rung for, arrives with suspicious speed and is instructed to take Eliza’s place outside the door, where she has probably been listening already. Wife and mistress are alone in the Blue Room, where the mistress seats herself without waiting for an invitation. Sophia takes the chair opposite and proceeds to ‘having introductions’.
‘You know me, I think, as Mrs Zedland. What am I to call you?’
‘Betsy-Ann Blore, also known as Mrs Samuel Shiner, though that’s not rightly my name.’ She gives a sudden bark of laughter.
‘Pray, what’s so amusing?’
‘O, queer names. Mrs Shiner, Mrs Zedland,’ the woman prattles as if speaking with an equal. At the notion of addressing her as ‘Mrs Shiner’, Sophia shudders inwardly.
‘I should be obliged, Betsy-Ann, if you’d come to the point. Say what you have to say.’
‘Well, you know who I am, I suppose,’ Betsy-Ann Blore retorts. ‘What I am to you, I mean. I’m here to tell you, Mrs Zedland, that you’ve been shabbily abused. And you might not believe it, but knowing the party as I do, I pity you from my heart.’
Sophia bites her lip: to be pitied, by the likes of this! Mere cant, of course. Such people patter off a sentimental rigmarole, devoid of true feeling.
‘You are too kind,’ she says frigidly, ‘though I doubt whether you can enter into my feelings, our situations being so different. You were never married to my husband ―’ here she breaks off, stricken by an appalling possibility. Suppose Edmund deceived her in that also, and has entered into some earlier contract with this child of the streets?
‘Never married,’ says Betsy-Ann Blore, if that is indeed her name. ‘But near enough.’
‘As far as I’m aware one is either married or one isn’t.’
‘Call it love, then.’ The dark eyes are big and hot with resentment; then they relax, and their expression grows sly. ‘After Ned you’re spoiled for any other man, you’ll be aware of that.’
Edmund has discussed her with this woman. Her bridal innocence, her humiliating weakness, all doubtless afforded them merriment. Had he painted her naked and posturing upon a brothel wall she could hardly feel more degraded, but she holds herself all the straighter as
she says, ‘What you call love strikes me as somewhat acquisitive.’
‘A what?’
‘Mercenary. For money.’
The woman laughs. ‘I don’t suppose you married on half a loaf. You had your settlements and all the rest of it, eh? But I haven’t come here to quarrel.’
‘Then be brief. You cannot imagine your presence is welcome.’
Her visitor’s manner grows confidential. ‘He’s played us both a filthy trick. I can’t get back at him in law, but you can.’
‘I hope you don’t imagine I’ll serve your turn, or act for you against my husband.’
‘You might feel different when you know. Where’s the blowen – the girl, I mean? I don’t want her walking in on us.’
‘She’ll stay outside.’
As if expressly to create confusion, Eliza knocks and enters with the tray.
‘Did you find any French Cream, sweetheart?’ the woman asks.
‘It’s all gone, Madam,’ Eliza answers with much artificial flutter. She is a hopeless liar: Sophia wonders how she can have failed to notice this before.
‘Eliza, wait outside with Fan.’ She is not going to be dictated to by this woman: both maids will remain for protection, even though it means they will listen at the door. She moves to the table and pours the tea herself.
‘That’s right,’ says the visitor, ‘you stand bitch.’
The teaspoon drops from Sophia’s fingers and bounces off the table leg. The woman bends down and picks it from the carpet, meekly enough; she seems surprised. Is it possible that no insult was intended? At least she holds her cup with a degree of grace and does not, as Sophia feared, slop tea from the saucer.
‘You’re in a tight spot,’ she begins as Sophia settles herself back in her chair. ‘He’s got hold of the blun – the money, eh?’
‘Are you speaking of Mr Zedland?’